Some inmates she meets at Deuel Vocational Institution near Tracy have tattoos spilling onto their hands and necks from beneath state-issue orange prison clothes.

Others with wild hair gaze quizzically at the small 65-year-old Catholic nun who asks them if they pray. She speaks with a high, lyrical voice that hints of her youth growing up in the Indian metropolis of Mumbai, a world away from her life today.

"At first it was kind of scary," she says of her prison visits. "But I think now I come back from there really feeling that I fulfilled something in someone's life, tried to help somebody."

Sister Ann has visited Deuel weekly for more than a decade.

It's not the only thing she does in her calling as a nun, but it may be the most thrilling, she said. On most days, Sister Ann organizes outings and luncheons for elderly parishioners of Manteca's St. Anthony's Catholic Church. She drives to the homes of shut-ins.

And once a week, she parks in front of the prison near Tracy, takes a string of rosary beads in hand and for an hour turns her attention to the souls of prisoners.

On visits to Deuel, Sister Ann makes her way through several heavy gates and dank hallways to the prison's infirmary and to the bedside of Sean Rodgers, a 38-year-old paraplegic from San Francisco.

She greets Rodgers, who pulls his upper torso up off the bed, and asks if he remembers the rosary.

"Yes I do," he answers in a feeble voice. Religious books, letters, medicine and a small TV clutter his bed tray.

He's taped an outdated calendar from the year before on the wall next to his pillow. The acrid smell of urine from a bedpan fills the room.

"And do you pray it still?" she asks. "Do you?"

He answers that yes he does. Rodgers confesses he has let his faith slip. He's a repeat drug offender living in the infirmary. He says he was shot 12 times, and bullet shards remain lodged in his spine, causing painful shocks in his legs.

Without his faith and occasional visits like Sister Ann's, he says he would be spiritually bankrupt.

For her part, Sister Ann says over time the fear that she used to feel walking prison hallways with inmates has turned into a deeper insight.

"We think we are giving them something, but I think we learn a lot, too, you know?" she said. "You learn what it is to be in a prison, to be cut off from the outside."